The New York Society Library has recently completed the online cataloging of its Hammond Collection: 1,152 novels, plays, poetry, and other works from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Originally part of a New England lending library, these volumes date from 1720 to 1847 (bulk dates 1770-1820) and reflect the popular reading interests of those years, including Gothic novels, romances, epistolary fiction, musical comedies, and other genres. A number of these books are quite scarce; in a few cases, the NYSL holds the only known extant copy.

As seen at Frankensteinia and elsewhere, the New York Public Library is hosting what looks to be a fantastic exhibition of Shelley circle materials, many on loan from the Bodleian Library at Oxford University. The exhibit runs through Sunday, June 24, 2012.

Romantic Circles is delighted to announce the publication of a new volume in our Praxis series, Romanticism and Disaster, co-edited by Jacques Khalip and David Collings.

In essays by Scott Juengel, William Keach, Timothy Morton, and Rei Terada, this volume considers and responds to the timely concept of devastated life by addressing how the capacity to read, interpret, and absorb disaster necessitates significant changes in theory, ethics, and common life. What if the consequences or “experience” of a disaster were less about psychic survival than an unblinking desire to face down the disaster as a challenge to normative structures?